Glass half empty

It's been a funny old week. The Glovers drew 1-1 at Brentford last weekend to more-or-less assure themselves of safety, but there's been no great outpouring of relief or satisfaction from either the club or the fanbase. Maybe that's because we're not mathematically safe as yet, though to be sure it would take a quite remarkable sequence of results from several different teams below us to put us back in the relegation frame now. It can all be put to bed on Saturday, when a point against fellow strugglers Oldham will be enough to secure League One football for a sixth successive season regardless of what any other team does.

Let's think about that for a minute. A sixth successive season at the highest level this club has ever played at! It ought to be a cause for celebration, another triumph against the odds, but it really doesn't feel like that. The club lives from hand to mouth and while we can recognise intellectually that finishing just above the relegation zone - again - is an achievement, it's not an achievement that gladdens the soul and quickens the blood. After all, what do we have to look forward to next season? At best, more of the same, the eternal struggle to avoid relegation, to remain a small fish in a big pool punching above our weight, to borrow from the YTFC book of cliches. Play-off's, or automatic promotion? On our budget? You're having a laugh. Actually, what's remarkable is quite how few games one has to win to stay in this division. With 2 games to go we are virtually safe and have won a grand total of 12 games from 44 played. Astonishing.

Ah, it's been a long season and at times quite a fraught one too. We've been much too reliant on loan players for most people's liking and you can't see that changing next season. But without those loan players the lack of any kind of strength in depth in the squad is concerning. Our occasional reserve side, including 8 first team squad players, lost 2-0 at Welton Rovers earlier in the week in the semi-final of the Somerset Premier Cup. All due respect to Welton, but a 2-0 loss against them would have been a bad result for our youth team. To lose against them with a team containing 8 first team players is a bit of a worry, to say the least.

Two games left to play in the season then and to be honest it will be a relief when it's all over. It didn't ought to be like this. All those years we played in the Southern League, the Isthmian League and then the Conference, we yearned to be in the Football League and now we're here and established and at times it's a real struggle. And that's despite the fact that at least at home, under Skivo we've generally tried to play attractive, passing football, even if at times it hasn't come off. I was looking at the Stevenage forum last week, reading all the messages of joy and relief from their supporters following their promotion to the Football League. It reminded me very strongly of how we felt 8 years ago when we won the Conference, the sense of anticipation we had in the season to come and the collective pride we all felt, pride in our town and pride in our club. Enjoy it while you can Stevenage fans, the reality of the Football League will rub off all that optimism soon enough.

We go into Saturday's match with half the team apparently carrying injuries. Shaun MacDonald has gone back to his parent club, Sam Williams and Aidan Downes are out for the rest of the season. The Glovers are 11/10 favourites to win, the draw is priced at 12/5 and an Oldham win is also 12/5. I fancy us to limp rather than sprint over the finishing line - my fiver is going on the draw. Running total: +£8.88p.

One more home game to go. Roll on summer, roll on the World Cup. I've had enough of this season.

Just read: The Seventh Scroll by Wilbur Smith, and The Complaints by Ian Rankin: My fourth Wilbur in a row and probably the weakest of the four I've read so far, or perhaps I'm just Wilbured out for now? That's not to say The Seventh Scroll is not a good read or I didn't enjoy it, I did; It's just not quite up to the standards of the previous titles I've read by the author. It's basically a treasure hunt set in modern day Ethiopia and is part of the author's 'Egypt' series. Having damned the title with faint praise I still managed to gallop through all 600-odd pages in about 3 days, so it must have something to recommend it. As for The Complaints; the king is dead, long live the new king! Rankin introduces us to a new protagonist after Rebus, Malcolm Fox, a copper investigating other coppers. The backdrop is still Edinburgh and as such familiar from the Rebus novels, and Rankin manages to make his new hero as distinctive and original as Rebus was, without inviting unwanted comparisons. Excellent stuff.